


Super Villain Origin Story

by Aegialia



Category: Leverage
Genre: Alternate Universe- Magic, Alternate Universe- Superpowers, Autistic Character, Backstory, Bisexual Characters, Multi, Pre-Canon, trans woman character, transgender character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-12 17:40:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4488663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aegialia/pseuds/Aegialia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where Dubenich has got the supernatural and just needs one normal man to keep them on task.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Drive Away My Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The grifter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for slight language, mention of misgendering/dysphoria, sex, and alcohol.   
> Title is from an Ida Maria Song.

She grows up in a big house, empty and silent. Her mother crochets, her father hunts, her brothers go to far-off schools. She teaches herself to watch, to talk, to listen. She learns how to make people do what she wants, how to get what she needs. Dinner parties and afternoon teas are classes and trials. She endures the ‘what a nice little boy’s and ‘he’s growing up just like his father’s and in return she figures out what smile, what movement of hands, what pace will turn the little gears in the minds of these men and women and get her what she wants.

When she’s nine, she spends most of her time daydreaming names and faces and learning how to sneak around the house. One day, she ends up in her mother’s wardrobe, admiring the warm coats and scarves. She peers out at her mother and sees her turn into someone new. Gone is the pale hair and green eyes, replaced by dark curls and a warm brown gaze that sees her child in the mirror. Her mother sighs and explains that they come from a long line of shape-shifters and that she was a former maid who’d taken the place of a young duchess who had wanted to run away and see the world. 

“Your brothers never showed any talent for it, maybe you got the gift,” her mother says, as she herds her out of her room. From then on, she spends every day practicing turning her face into that of someone else. 

When she’s fifteen, she puts on a face that is a hodge-podge of all the girls that she sees walking through town, steals a bag of clothes from her mother and a wallet from her father, and takes a train to London. She decides that her next name will be Paige Hart. 

At 18, she’s a model for a young, starving artist in Paris. She’s Rose Buckley now and she looks how she think her mother would have looked when she was young and not yet a duchess. She loves the painting, loves the painter, but like all good romances, she has to move on. 

Being able to discard faces and names and lives as easily as tissues makes grifting an obvious choice of career path. She starts with little stuff- charming her way into a necklace and then disappearing, suddenly a spry 12-year-old, looking like the wife of the curator while her partner steals a painting. 

She starts moving up, getting recruited by established crews and running cons on big names. The name she’s using professionally these days is Jenny Langston. She stays with Marcus Starke for almost a year, snags the First David not long after that, and hops across the pond and the Stanley Cup with Vlad. The name Jenny gets implicated in a rather messy art heist and she abandons it, picking up a new one- Sophie Devereaux. 

She meets an ex-FBI agent in Cairo a few years later. She’s tall and cocky and her name is Tara Cole. They’re both trying to get into the same vault at the same time, but they both fail. They find each other later that night and go to Sophie’s hotel room, trading stories and imitating each other’s faces. They end up falling into bed. Tara’s gone the next morning but they see each other again in Brussels and Ulan Bator and Dallas. They fall into a pattern- compete, kiss, flee. It’s good, it’s casual, and it gives her someone to be real with. 

In Paris, some wanker insurance agent almost catches her. His name is Nathan Ford and unfortunately, he’s a very good husband, which makes it hard to get him to forget he ever saw her. They dance across Europe, each winning and losing some. It’s fun and she thinks that if they’d met some other way, they could be something interesting. 

When she turns 40, she looks at her life and decides it’s time to retire. She is one of the greatest grifters of her time and she’s got more than enough loot. She’s always wanted to try acting. In the back of her mind, she knows she won’t stay out forever, but that doesn’t matter now.


	2. Bag Of Hammers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The hitter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for brief mention of homophobia, abuse, a little language, violence, child death, and medical experimentation.  
> Title from the Thao & The Get Down Stay Down song

Oklahoma’s got mountains that you can lose yourself in. They’re old and smoothed away, but with enough hollows and heights to leave behind your mind and troubles and fade away. Eliot Spencer is good at finding his way around these woods, knows their ins and outs and their hiding places. There’s this one bunch of boulders about half a mile from his Granddaddy’s house that he loves. They’re worn away from years of weather, surrounded by white birches and covered in lichen. Even when his shoulders widen and he gets a little taller, he’s still able to curl up under the biggest one, hidden away from everything, face to face with centipedes and daddy long legs. His dog Bandit always finds him, but she’s a friendly old mutt and he doesn’t mind the company. 

He’s popular in school, he’s athletic, he tests well, all the girls like him, but living in this little town with all these nice people is like wearing a kid’s shirt. He mouths along to hymns, goes hunting, is on the football team, but it always feels like he’s playing dress-up.

One thing that no one can deny is that he’s loyal. Once someone’s his person, he’ll stick with them, come hell or high water. So when he comes home early from school one day and sees his daddy slapping his mother across the cheek, he doesn’t waste anytime before hitting the son of a bitch back. He doesn’t get kicked out, but it’s a near thing and the last few years at home are all tense.

He’s not sure what’s wrong with him, but he’s got suspicions. It’s the twist in his stomach when his buddies are laughing about how Gordon Duckett is a faggot and the way he catches himself looking at the other guys sometimes. He knows, in some way, what he is, but he likes girls, he’s had enough girlfriends to prove it, and so he ignores it and doesn’t let himself think about it. 

Once he graduates high school, he joins the military. He’s smart and strong and loyal and soon enough a General Allen shows up with an offer. He’s a big old gentleman, prone to clapping people on the shoulder and laughing at his own jokes. He explains that the government is currently funding research into strength and healing enhancement. They’ve reached the stage of human testing and he’s in charge of finding volunteers. Eliot joins at once. What ever he can do for his country, right?

He turns 25 in the middle of Uzbekistan, covered in dust. The experiments were a complete success. There’s a gash in his thigh which he should probably deal with. It’ll heal soon, but infection’s always an issue. 

He starts regretting volunteering a couple years later. There’s lots of people who could use a man that can take a bullet to the arm and still break three necks in under fifteen minutes. At some point, the exact source of the orders stops mattering so much. 

He kisses Aimee, pushes her hair back from her face, and promises to come back to her. She doesn’t believe it, but she holds him and drives him to the airport. A couple weeks later, when he’s in Croatia, he realizes with a lurch that he’s lost the last place he called home.

The jobs come. His infamy grows. Sometimes, he dreams about Oklahoma, but once he manages to start sleeping only 90 minutes a night, they stop. He’s barely got any scars, but he knows where they should be. 

Moreau comes into his life and tells him to kill the three young children of an enemy who won’t back down. He does and then he disappears for three months. He finds a tiny room for rent in Minsk. He turns himself off, doing what is necessary for his body to survive and nothing else. One morning, he gets up and realizes that he’s going to hell. He packs his bags and finds his next job. 

Amsterdam is probably beautiful. Eliot can’t remember the last time he went somewhere and didn’t kill anybody. He leaves a while later, he’s not sure how long, with no one dead and a whole new use for his hands. The guy he was supposed to kill was Toby Heath. He’s not sure what happened, but he thinks he’s happy it did. Whenever he has a day off after that, he enrolls in cooking classes. 

He starts digging into the experiment that he participated in. Nothing that he finds is good. Five of the others died during the initial stages, three died on some mission from the government, four are still working for the U.S., and three, including Eliot, are freelancers. The web leading back to whoever was in charge is too tangled for him to figure out with his current nonexistent computer skills and so he lets it drop.


	3. Wolves Without Teeth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The thief

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for child neglect and internalized ableism  
> Title from an Of Monsters and Men song

Parker chooses her name when she’s four. She steals it from a little boy at the mall whose mother is looking for him. They both have found the same hiding space and in return for her letting him keep it, he gives her his name. She likes it. It’s nothing like the one the tall-scratchy-sugary-loud people that she lives with give her and it’s small enough to get away. Pink-fuzz-squawk finds her after she leaves the boy and hustles her back to the car. 

Everything is always enormous and fast and bright and impossible to escape, especially after she steals Bunny and has to live with all the other kids. She gets good at hiding. She knows every place in the group home that other people don’t, but even those places aren’t really hidden, because they can always be found. She never is alone.

She’s always been stealing things. Asking doesn’t work, she’s too quiet or monotone or people are too mean for it to ever work, so she takes what she wants and needs. She runs away from the home when she’s 9, the streets are scary but at least she has her own home. She lives on the roofs of the city, bouncing between buildings and learning each stray cat and pigeon’s name. One day, she slips up next to an odd old woman, with grey wings and tall shoes. No one seems to stare at her, but Parker knows that anyone with wings must have something good in her purse. She gets her hand in and feels something smooth and cool and round. It hums in her hand and she is lost, lost, lost, until a delicate hand with sharp grey nails is curling around her wrist. 

“I’d let go of that, little duck. Not made for people like you. But for your cleverness, I’ll give you a gift if you follow me,” the winged woman says, never turning around to face Parker. Now is when she should melt away, seek shelter, hide. Instead, she lets go of the slip-whoosh-grey in the purse and follows the woman. 

She walks up a stoop to a large brownstone. Inside, everything is sharp blues and soft greys. It’s too neat for anyone to live in it. 

“I should offer you some food or drink, but then you’d have to stay here for a rather long time and I doubt that being trapped would be good for you,” the woman says as she hangs up her scarf. She walks into a large living room off the hallway, with Parker following. 

“My name is Mara, by the way,” she remarks as she reaches around to her back and plucks a downy feather. 

“Parker,” she replies, after some thought. It feels safe to give this woman her name. 

“Alright then, Parker, think of what you want most in the world and drop this. Once it hits the floor, you’ll have it,” Mara says, handing over the feather. 

Parker takes it and thinks as hard as she can _I want to disappear_. She watches it drift to the ground, her hand still stretched out. Once it lands, her arm vanishes. She looks down and sees nothing. 

“Do you know how to turn back?” Mara asks, her hand resting neatly on her chin. 

Parker considers. She turns the issue around in her head like a pretty stone, trying to understand all of its sides. She shifts something inside her head and her body winks back. She shifts that little things and she’s invisible again. She begins giggling and going back and forth as fast as she can. A breath of wind, scented like flowers and rain moves through the room and things seem to spin a little. She’s not sure how she ends up out side again, on the other side of the city, but when she tries to disappear, she still can. 

Being invisible is a great advantage to a thief or a get away driver. She isn’t good at dealing with other people, but she gets good enough that they come to her. One day, she tries to pickpocket a well-dressed middle aged man and ends up with a teacher. He dismisses her powers as a cheap trick and makes her learn how to be a great thief without them. 

She breaks into Archie’s house sometimes while his family is out and turn invisible and wait for them to come back. She watches from somewhere where no one will touch her and try to figure out how they work. What do they do that makes them right? What do they do that makes them normal? Even before she met the grey-soft-sharp woman, she had never been able to do what other people did naturally. Even if she wasn’t a thief, this home could never have been hers.


	4. Can You Blame Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The hacker

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for surgery, eye surgery, and generally kinda creepy medical stuff  
> Title's from a Matt&Kim song  
> Seth Brundle is from the movie "The Fly"

Alec Hardison has always tended to take the cautionary tales from sci-fi as accounts of what mistakes not to make, not what lines science may not cross in fear of eternal damnation. Alright, so cyborgs and androids and robots and all the rest of them might usually go off the rails and kill millions, but that just means that you have to get better code, right? Seth Brundle might have gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to self-experimentation, but as long as Hardison keeps all flies out of his work space, he should be fine. 

His Nana is endlessly cool for letting him talk about all the stuff he wants to do when he gets old enough. He’s hacked the Bank of Iceland by the time he’s 17, but he’s positive the future’s gonna be in biohacking. The human body is weird and weak and he’s got so much he wants to do, he’s not going to be held back by his meat car breaking down. 

It’s a game, kinda, in the online circles where he runs. How close can you get to not being human anymore? What can you make yourself into? He’s technically in college still, so he starts taking all the biology classes he can. He reads anatomy books until his eyes start to glaze over and tinkers for the rest of the night. The first thing that he builds for himself that really works is a sensor that beeps at him when he’s in the vicinity of allergens. It’s not that impressive, but he’s damn proud and so is his Nana, which is really what matters. 

He’s done all his research, but it’s still probably not the best idea he’s ever had to do surgery on his eyes by himself in his dorm. But, hey, he’s always had shitty vision. If he accidently blinds himself, he’ll probably be able to cope pretty well. He gets close to backing down, to remembering that, oh yeah, this is going to be terrible, but then he remembers the smug asshole on all the forums who was always bragging about how he dared to do what no one else would and preformed surgery on himself like every week and Hardison starts the procedure before he get regret it anymore. 

When he comes home for Thanksgiving, he tells Nana that he got contacts, because he’s pretty sure that saying, “Hey, I stuck a laser in my eye one night and now I have freakishly good vision and can kinda see in the dark, what’s up with you?” would go over badly. It is pretty cool to finally be able see the ceiling at night and not have everything be fuzzy.

He bounces around the world for a while, doing what’s fun and hard. He meets a couple of grifters and thieves and works with them for a job or two, but it turns out that most of the people in his line of work are A) creepy, B) arrogant, or C) actually the devil in the flesh. He’s great at what he does and he likes it and he doesn’t need anyone else, so eventually he just stops working with crews. He gets a rep as a loner, which is kinda cool, because he’s never had any rep other than ‘nerd’ before. 

He gets close to getting caught a couple of times and every time, he decides he’s done, he’s out, he’s going to move a couple blocks from Nana and work as tech support until he dies. Every time he starts packing up, planning his next move, something catches his eye and it’s another three weeks before he even realizes that he was thinking about getting out of the game. 

Every time he upgrades his computer equipment, he upgrades his body. It’s just another tool, a squishy, delicate tool, but a tool nonetheless. He exercises and tries to eat well (though he doesn’t) and keeps adding more things into his body. He did the calculations one time and figures out that he probably counts as a cyborg now, which is pretty badass.


	5. Out Of The Sun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The mastermind and the first job

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for canon-typical alcoholism, slight language, and brief suicidal thoughts  
> Title's from a Superchunk song

Nate Ford was getting pretty cozy with the idea of drinking himself to death when some sweaty little bastard shows up and starts babbling. If he’d been a little more or a little less drunk, he’d definitely have punched him, but he’s in that fuzzy in-between place that lets him get led to a table to look at the list this guy has put together. It’s certainly an impressive list, though Nate questions the wisdom of hiring a thief who can literally vanish, a hitter who can tie a knot with someone’s leg, and a hacker who’s something like half computer these days. He wouldn’t trust any of them for five minutes on their own. Together, he’s pretty sure they’ll betray Dubenich, each other, and possibly some random guy they meet on the street before they even get started. 

“You know, I’m not like them. I don’t have any powers or whatever. I mean, I’ve caught them all before, but if you’re looking for someone who can control them, I’m just a normal guy,” Nate says, shaking his head. 

“I’ve got three freaks of nature on my payroll. What I need right now is one normal man to just keep them moving forward,” Dubenich says, leaning forward, desperation obvious. 

It’s not like Nate’s got anything better to do. 

It was hard enough to be an insurance agent trying to track down one super human, being a broke alcoholic trying to wrangle three argumentative, bizarre people into stealing one very specific thing from a building of things to steal is nearly impossible. Right now, he’s trying very hard to ignore the hacker complaining about the tech that Nate brought along. 

“This stuff is ridiculous. I mean, if you’re trying to eavesdrop on your babysitter, this is all good but for a heist? You might as well have a tin can and some string.”

“You got something better?” the hitter growls back.

“Hells yeah, I do. Now this baby right here is waterproof, can take up to 30 pounds of pressure, and transmit underground. Plus, it’s linked up to my GPS system so it can send directions to you if you ask it.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Hey, at least I didn’t volunteer for some sketchy secret government experiment with wolves or something that I know absolutely nothing about because I don’t want to die young.”

They go silent, which Nate’s headache is grateful for. 

“Can I have one?” Parker’s chipper voice cuts in, followed by a yelp from Hardison. 

“I guess the rumors I heard about you are true,” Eliot says, amused. 

“Do not do that, woman! Do you want to give me a heart attack?” Hardison shrieks, breathing heavily. 

Nate hears the rustling of Parker putting on her harness. 

“Aren’t you going to go invisible again?” Hardison asks.

“That’s cheating,” Parker says and jumps before Nate can even start the count down. 

“That’s twenty pounds of crazy in a five pound bag,” Eliot says as he and the hacker start moving to the elevator. 

The con goes pretty well, all things considered. Hardison manages to freak out Eliot with his ‘USB in his pointer finger’ trick, which is impressive, and Parker stays visible for the entirety of the burn scam. He goes back to his hotel room and starts drinking again. 

The next morning is a blur of shouting and invisible women with guns and explosions. Nate isn’t fully coherent until he wakes up in a hospital bed and starts directing their escape. 

When they get back to Hardison’s apartment, he lets the others argue and plan how to get away. He’s playing with the puzzle that has been this whole affair and doesn’t need their distractions. It all comes together in a wonderful click and the way forward is glowing in obvious neon. It’s time to find Sophie. 

She’s as beautiful as the first time he saw her, though of course this is a new face. He suspects that this is her favorite one, it’s certainly the one the most people have seen. She still can’t act but he could watch her forever. 

Honestly, he’s amazed with how well the whole con goes. He planned for every contingency he could think of, but there’s always something you can’t think of. Somehow, no one’s dead or severely injured. They even made an enormous amount of money, thanks to Hardison’s hard work. And that should be it, but of course it isn’t. Hardison’s the first, talking about how he doesn’t usually work with people in their field but all these guys seem pretty cool, and then there’s Eliot, who’s doing his best to not seem invested, and then Parker, who has gone invisible. He could have dealt with those three, but then there’s Sophie and she’s wearing her favorite face and a sly smile and suddenly his planning of drinking until he died seems like it’s going to get disrupted a little bit. 

He offers her his arm and walk, with her talking about all the plays she’s auditioned for in the last few years and gossiping about the other tenants in her building. Behind them, Eliot grumps at Hardison and Parker pokes him, still invisible, making him jump and scream every time. He wonders what those three will become if this team things works. Hell, he wonder what he’ll become if this team thing works.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is by far the longest fic I've ever wroten, woah. I hope you enjoyed it! If I get around to it, I'll probably continue with this universe. You can find me on tumblr at aegialia.


End file.
